The Wizard of Us

Shortly I'll be off to see the Wizard....The Wizard of Oz performed by the West Plains High School at the Avenue Theatre. I ventured back on to Facebook for a few minutes the day after the election, and I was pleasantly surprised to see (mostly) a mood of reconciliation amongst most of my friends and their friends. I did see a ridiculous chart about how the Democrats stole the election because of the lack of voter i.d. laws. Please note: similar future posts will have the end result of such "friends" being hidden by me if I see the posts. I'm not going to have that nonsense on my wall.

I'm short on time this morning, but here are some gentle reminders for my social conservative friends. Please take them as points to consider. I know I have many friends who will disagree with some of these observations, but we all need to start having conversations about how to work together to address the things we're passionate about, how to stop creating strife and instead, create solutions.

- If you believe there should be no abortions, don't have one. Men and women, don't have unprotected sex. If you are a member of a church, rather than campaign to make abortion illegal, perhaps you should immediately set up a program to welcome women who have an unplanned pregnancy, for whatever reason, and offer them an alternative other than abortion which is more than a prayer for their well-being. Help them find the way to adoption, or whatever it takes to insure their children, unwanted by them, will be wanted and cared for. Make it your mission to do what you can to see that there is never the need for abortions, except for medical reasons. Can you please consider there are times when an abortion is the best (as terrible as it is) option for some women?
- If you believe God is the one who is in charge of life and death and unwanted pregnancies are God's will, then I think you must also believe, as harsh as it sounds, that couples who can't conceive a child should not use medical intervention to help them have children. Rather than expensive and often risky procedures, those couples should adopt. Would that not also be God's will?
- If life is sacred, you cannot, in good conscience, favor the death penalty. Judgment is in God's realm. Yes, people who commit crimes should be jailed, many for the rest of their lives, but how/why can we use the law to kill them? There are have been innocent people who have been executed, and when there's even one instance of an innocent death (of a living, breathing individual) that should be enough for us to question the death penalty.
- If life is sacred, we should never, as a country, participate in wars where the rules and methods have been changed. Civilians have never been "fair game" in modern rules of war, and yet, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of noncombatants (women and children and others not directly contributing to the wars) in the Middle East have been killed in recent wars. I don't believe it is intentional by our soldiers, but it is happening, nonetheless. We must stop being warmongers. When I talk to 90 year old men who break down and cry because of what they did during WWII, because of their friends who died in action, I wonder what it will take for us to ever stop sending our young men and women off to war, forcing them to have their lives changed forever. Blessed are the peace makers.
- If you believe homosexuality is wrong, don't fall in love with someone who is the same sex as you. Before we start harping about the sanctity of marriage, perhaps we, as believers, should do something about the divorce epidemic among Christians.

These are just a few things I've been considering lately, especially in the context of the Wizard of Oz. Do you remember how it goes? The wizard really didn't have the power to change to things. The power actually had been with Dorothy and her friends the whole time they were seeking for someone else to change their circumstances.

A set of laws will not make people moral. Government cannot force its people to do the right thing, and who decides what the right thing even is? Let's stop looking for magic solutions and start making the changes we can to start shifting from judgment to making a difference.